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From the Archive Series

Some special stories pulled from Consortiumnews.com’s Archive:

Republished Mar. 20, 2015: One of the great battles of Danny Schechter’s life was the fight to end apartheid in South Africa, but he never soft-pedaled the challenges the country continued to face – nor did he accept the revisionist history minimizing the role of millions in that global campaign for justice, as he wrote last year.

Republished Mar. 20, 2015: The death of Danny Schechter, “the News Dissector,” at age 72 from cancer marks a sad moment for independent journalism. Schechter’s was a strong voice against the empty platitudes and blatant hypocrisies that have come to define modern American media and politics, as he explained in an article last year.

Republished Mar. 17, 2015: In reopening the investigation into the mysterious plane crash that killed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961, the United Nations is appealing to member states to release long-secret files related to this cold case from a tense moment in the Cold War in Africa, which Lisa Pease examined in 2013.

Republished Mar. 13, 2015: The letter to Iran from 47 Republicans senators, seeking to kill President Obama’s talks on limiting Iran’s nuclear program, recalls other GOP sabotage of foreign policy by Democratic presidents, including Richard Nixon’s scheme to stop a Vietnam peace deal in 1968, as Robert Parry wrote in 2012.

Republished Mar. 10, 2015: Almost 20 years ago – even before the Iraq WMD fiasco – as the CIA was celebrating its half-century anniversary, the impact of a Reagan-era “reorganization” was being felt in the “politicization” of intelligence, Robert Parry wrote in 1997. Now, a new reorganization could make matters worse.

Republished Mar. 9, 2015: Before Gen. David Petraeus was caught giving secrets to his biographer-mistress, he was giving special favors and access to influential neocons, one reason why Official Washington was so happy that he received only a hand-slap for his crime, ties that Robert Parry examined in 2012.

Republished Feb. 10, 2015: George W. Bush’s torture policies may have been extraordinary in the direct participation of U.S. personnel but they were far from unique, with Ronald Reagan having followed a similar path in his anti-leftist wars in Central America, as Robert Parry reported in 2009.

Republished Feb. 2, 2015: Some Americans view Haiti through a lens of racial bigotry, seeing the poverty-stricken Caribbean country as proof that black people can’t govern themselves. But there is a very different historical narrative regarding America’s profound debt to Haiti, as Robert Parry described in 2010.

Republished Jan. 19, 2015: Martin Luther King Day is a rare moment in American life when people reflect – even if only briefly – on the ideals that guided Dr. King’s life and led to his death. Thus, the struggle over his message is intense, pitting a bland conventional view against a radical call for profound change, says Brian J. Trautman.

Republished Jan. 19, 2015: When Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. went to jail to focus national attention on the injustice of segregation, he was stung by criticism from Christian clergy who feared upsetting the status quo and urged “moderation,” prompting his historic rejoinder from the Birmingham jail, as Rev. Howard Bess recalls

Republished Dec. 21, 2014: A little-noticed disclosure from cables leaked by Pvt. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning showed how the U.S. government put Yukiya Amano in as the UN’s top nuclear inspector so he could hype claims about Iran building a nuclear bomb, as Robert Parry reported on the eve of Manning’s sentencing in 2013.

Republished Dec. 17, 2014: As much as U.S. officials have decried “terrorism” – even equating harboring a terrorist with the actual deed – they have applied a completely different standard to “our” terrorists who are protected from extradition and treated with kid gloves, as Robert Parry reported in 2011.

Republished Dec. 15, 2014: Much like the 9/11 attacks, the Cold War plunged the U.S. government into the “dark side,” especially in Latin America where the CIA colluded with torturers and assassins, leading to grisly murders and enduring mysteries, as Samuel Blixen described in 1999.

Republished Dec. 15, 2014: The Senate’s torture report is provoking some rare self-reflection among Americans even as TV talk shows are dominated by torture apologists. But there is a larger context to America’s modern embrace of the “dark side” including support for genocide, as Robert Parry reported in 2013.

Republished Dec. 13, 2014: It’s been a decade since the big U.S. newspapers hounded journalist Gary Webb to suicide because he exposed their failure to stop one of Ronald Reagan’s worst crimes: drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan Contras. The sordid saga finally was told by a Hollywood movie, Robert Parry noted in October.

Republished Dec. 13, 2014: To understand why many right-wingers are so defensive about offensive U.S. acts, even waterboarding and anal rape, you must look back to the Reagan years when “moral equivalence” became an accusation against applying universal standards to the U.S., as Robert Parry wrote last March about Ukraine.

Republished Dec. 3, 2014: Central to the question of whether America’s Right is correct that the Constitution mandated a weak central government is the person of James Madison and what he and his then-fellow Federalists were doing at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, wrote Robert Parry in 2013.

Republished Oct. 23, 2014: You can’t understand the worsening Mideast violence without knowing the modern history of Palestine, a story that begins with European anti-Semitism causing Zionists to claim Palestine for the Jews and to expel the Arabs, wrote retired U.S. diplomat William R. Polk in the first of three parts.

Republished Oct. 13, 2014: The New York Times just published a front-page article about state officials worried that guardrail end units installed on highways across America could kill and maim people. But Consortiumnews readers knew this problem in February 2013 based on a groundbreaking story by Daniel J. Goldstein.

Republished Oct. 2, 2014: After six years, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has nearly weathered his chilly relationship with President Obama and can expect to coast through the next two years ignoring Obama’s appeals. But Obama is not the first U.S. president to be played by Israel, as Morgan Strong wrote in 2010.

Republished Sep. 29, 2014: With Hollywood poised to release “Kill the Messenger,” a movie showing how the mainstream U.S. media destroyed journalist Gary Webb for reviving the Contra-cocaine scandal in the mid-1990s, we are reposting Georg Hodel’s 1997 account of how Webb was betrayed by his own editors.

Republished Sep. 18, 2014: As Scots vote on independence from Great Britain, part of the motivation for those voting “aye” is the brutal history of English repression of Scottish freedom, dating back centuries but fresh in the minds of many Scots, a lesson about unintended consequences of violence that should be remembered by today’s politicians, as Robert Parry noted in 2005.

Republished Sep. 15, 2014: Richard L. Fricker, a courageous journalist and frequent writer at Consortiumnews, died on Sept. 12 from heart failure. Among Fricker’s important work was his investigation of the U.S. government’s PROMIS software which preceded the NSA’s Orwellian PRISM, as Fricker noted last July.

Republished Sep. 20, 2014: At the first anniversary of the Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, there is a concerted effort to reestablish the original conventional wisdom, blaming the Syrian government for the hundreds of deaths. The goal seems to be to bury the alternative narrative that later emerged, as Robert Parry wrote last April.

Republished May 26, 2014:President Obama is preparing a speech to address neocon charges that he’s shown “weakness” toward U.S. adversaries, but the greater challenge would be for him to tell the people why cooperation with those adversaries is vital for real peace, as Robert Parry wrote in March.

Republished May 26, 2014: As President Obama prepares to make another speech explaining his foreign policy, the question is whether he can climb out of the rut of his previous whiny apologies for continuing many of George W. Bush’s abuses, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote last year.

Republished May 14, 2014: Official Washington dismisses any reference to Ukraine’s neo-Nazis as “Russian propaganda” because everyone knows that no respectable U.S. leader would get in bed with such people. But Wall Street bankers didn’t have such qualms, Jerry Meldon reported in 2013.

Republished May 14, 2014: The key role of neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s U.S.-backed coup is denied by the mainstream U.S. press, which can’t believe the U.S. government would collaborate with such unsavory characters, but that isn’t the real history, as Robert Parry reported in 2010.

Republished May 4, 2014: During the Cold War, two presidents delivered honest warnings to Americans, Eisenhower on the “military-industrial complex” and Kennedy on how “we all inhabit this small planet.” Now Ukraine presents a challenge to President Obama to speak out for peace, as Robert Parry wrote in March.

Republished Apr. 13, 2014: Over the centuries as Christianity bent to the interests of the rich and powerful, the story of Jesus’s fateful week in Jerusalem was reshaped to minimize its pivotal event, overturning the Temple’s money tables, a challenge to religious and political power, says Rev. Howard Bess.

Republished Mar. 31, 2014: Many of the world’s crises, like those in Syria and Ukraine, can be better understood by factoring in Israel’s maneuvers to involve the U.S. in bombing Iran. Documents leaked by Pvt. Manning exposed how one such scheme might have played out, as Robert Parry wrote in 2013.

Republished Mar. 21, 2014: The death of Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh on Wednesday at the age of 102 marked the passing of what is now rare in the American Establishment, a person who courageously fought for a truthful historical record, as Robert Parry explained in this 1997 review of Walsh’s memoir, Firewall.

Republished Feb. 21, 2014: Ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern has filed suit over an incident three years ago when he was roughly arrested for standing, back turned to Secretary of State Clinton as she gave a speech on the right to dissent. McGovern also was placed on a special watch list. He described his arrest in 2011.

Republished Feb. 7, 2014: As the 12-year Afghan War grinds to what many Americans see as failure, ex-Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other hawks won’t admit their counterinsurgency “surge” in 2009 was a waste of lives and money – or that U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry was right when he warned President Obama, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote in 2010.

Republished Feb. 6, 2014: Both Republicans and Democrats fawn over the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who was born 103 years ago on Feb. 6, but the reality of his bloodstained presidency is much different from the pleasing memories. Reagan even promoted Guatemala’s genocide, Robert Parry reported in 2013.

Republished Feb. 6, 2014: Ronald Reagan, who was born on Feb. 6, 1911, ranks among the most honored U.S. presidents of modern times with his name etched into public buildings across the country. Even Democrats shy from criticizing his legacy. But is this Reagan worship deserved, Robert Parry asked in 2009.

Republished Jan. 30, 2014: In a coincidence of history, right-wing icon Dick Cheney shares the same birthday as liberal icon Franklin Roosevelt, Jan. 30. But the ironic link goes even deeper since – in many ways – it was FDR’s New Deal that made Dick Cheney possible, as Robert Parry explained in 2011.

Republished Jan. 14, 2014: As world leaders struggle to praise the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, infamous for abetting the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, another grim chapter of Sharon’s history was his role in the Guatemalan genocide, Robert Parry wrote in 2013.

Republished Jan. 6, 2014: Central to the neocons’ narrative on the current Mideast crisis – as Islamic terrorists seize territory in Iraq and Syria – is that George W. Bush’s “successful surge” in Iraq in 2007 had achieved “victory at last,” but was squandered by President Obama. But that’s a self-serving myth, as Robert Parry wrote in 2012.

Republished Jan. 6, 2014: As al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists gain ground in Iraq and Syria, U.S. neocons are eager to focus attention on President Obama’s “failure” to militarily dominate the Mideast; otherwise, Americans might recall how this mess got started, as Robert Parry wrote on the Iraq War’s tenth anniversary.

Republished Dec. 27, 2013: President Obama’s diplomatic breakthrough with Iran on its nuclear program still faces strong resistance, but the historic opening might have been disrupted if not for the leaks of Pvt. Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, who got a 35-year prison sentence as “thanks,” as Robert Parry reported last summer.

Republished Dec. 19, 2013: Though largely forgotten, the brief U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 established key precedents that would reappear in later conflicts – from the Persian Gulf and Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq – policies shaped, in part, by Gen. Colin Powell, as Robert Parry and Norman Solomon wrote in 1996.

Republished Dec. 19, 2013: On Dec. 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to arrest Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug charges. The U.S. news media viewed the assault as a case of Bush seeking justice, but there was a darker back story of U.S. guilt, as Robert Parry reported in 1997.

Republished Dec. 14, 2013: The comedy team Key and Peele cut through the Right’s Second Amendment madness best in a bit in which Peele travels back in time with Uzis to confront its authors over their careless wording. But there is nothing funny about piles of dead kids, victims of bad history, as Robert Parry wrote in 2013.

Republished Dec. 14, 2013: One year ago, 20 first-graders went off to school in Newtown, Connecticut, some surely thinking about the upcoming Christmas holidays. But they never came home, becoming – along with six of their educators – collateral damage in the NRA’s big-dollar war to boost gun sales, as Beverly Bandler noted last March.

Republished Dec. 5, 2013: The latest Christmas tradition is for Fox News and the Right to work “the base” into a lather over a supposed “War on Christmas,” but there is a larger message in how right-wing propaganda creates “victimhood,” as Robert Parry noted in 2005.

Republished Oct. 10, 2013: The U.S. capture of an alleged al-Qaeda terror leader in Libya underscores the failure of the major news media to give the public the full story during the military intervention that led to Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster and murder. Mainstream journalists behaved more like propagandists, as Robert Parry reported in 2011.

Republished Oct. 1, 2013: Behind the U.S. government shutdown is the Right’s erroneous belief that the U.S. Constitution tightly limits the federal government and carves out broad powers for the states, a bogus history that suggests the Tea Partiers don’t understand the Founding document, as historian Jada Thacker wrote in July 2013.

Republished Oct. 1, 2013: At the center of the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government is the claim that a “mandate” requiring Americans to get health insurance violates Founding principles, but the Framers of the Constitution were comfortable with a similar mandate for an armed militia, as Robert Parry noted in 2012.

Republished Sep. 5, 2013: With few exceptions, mainstream U.S. news personalities are again selling war to the American people, this time on Syria by asserting false certainty on who launched the Aug. 21 chemical weapons strike and pretending the Syrian government – not the rebels – blocked peace talks, a media crisis that lingers from the Iraq War, as Peter Dyer wrote in 2008.

How Truth Can Save Lives Republished Aug. 22, 2013: A vengeful U.S. military has sentenced Pvt. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison for disclosing unpleasant truths about the Afghan and Iraq wars and other government deceits. Manning’s bravery inspired ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern in 2010 to reflect on an earlier dilemma between secrecy and truth.

Republished Aug. 18, 2013: More than a quarter century after President Reagan ordered President Carter’s solar panels removed from the White House roof, new ones are being installed, a belated nod to the foresight of one president and a rebuke to the blindness of another, as Sam Parry explained in 2012.

Republished Aug. 14, 2013: American rightists and many Republicans continue to treat President Obama with a personal disrespect that reeks of racism: hoisting signs about his “Kenyan birth,” laughing at him as a rodeo clown, wishing for his impeachment – hostility that recalls the reaction to other African-American “firsts,” Robert Parry wrote last May.

Republished Aug. 9, 2013: Even today – more than two decades after the Soviet Union disappeared – the Washington press corps views U.S.-Russian disputes through a one-way Cold War lens, with Moscow always at fault. But the reality is more complicated, as Robert Parry explained about Afghanistan in 2012.

Republished Aug. 8, 2013: For years, “defectors” from “enemy” states have supplied the U.S. government and media with propaganda that is eagerly repeated to justify economic, diplomatic or even military retaliation. That was the case with Iraq in 2003 and now with Iran, as Robert Parry reported in 2012.

Republished Aug. 6, 2013: The purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gives the newspaper a chance to shed its neocon ideology and get back to sound journalism. But that will require a housecleaning of top editors and columnists who turned the Post into the neocons’ flagship, like Fred Hiatt, Robert Parry wrote .

Republished Jul. 21, 2013: Often annoying her press colleagues, the late Helen Thomas was one of the few Washington journalists who would shatter the predictable frame for discussing tough issues. When she heard lazy rationalizations, Thomas would press the policymaker on why, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote in 2010.

Republished Jul. 21, 2013: Helen Thomas, a courageous trailblazer for women covering power politics, has died at the age of 92. Though recalled for her tough questioning of presidents, her career was unceremoniously ended when her media colleagues ostracized her over a clumsy remark about Israel, Robert Parry reported in 2010.

Republished Jun. 22, 2013: James Comey, President Obama’s nominee to be FBI director, was a conservative Republican lawyer when he went to work for George W. Bush’s administration and witnessed how the White House pulled the Justice Department’s strings to get clearance for torture, as Robert Parry reported in 2010.

Republished Jun. 21, 2013: Iran’s election of Hassan Rowhani as president has raised hopes for a deal, with Iran accepting tighter constraints on its nuclear program and the West rolling back sanctions. But there has been a long – and often secret – history of double-dealing between Iran and the U.S., Robert Parry reported in 2010.

Republished Jun. 17, 2013: When the U.S. news media adopts a “conventional wisdom,” it is hard to dislodge, as the narrative of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “stealing” the 2009 election shows. Though still politically pleasing to Big Media, the storyline was never supported by evidence, Robert Parry reported in 2010.

Republished Jun. 14, 2013: Only public outrage – global and domestic – stands any hope of pushing back the National Security Agency’s “surveillance state.” As hard as that may be, there was success a decade ago disrupting President George W. Bush’s Orwellian Total Information Awareness that Nat Parry described in 2002.

Republished Jun. 6, 2013: U.S. history took a dark turn in the aftermath of World War II as the Truman administration judged the Soviet Union and socialism bigger threats than the remnants of Nazism and other right-wing ideologies. So, Official Washington protected some of the world’s worst killers, Robert Parry reported in 2010.

Republished May 17, 2013: Ex-Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, who died Friday in prison at 87, saw the Dirty War that killed some 30,000 people as an intellectual exercise in exterminating subversive thought even across generations by transferring babies of the “disappeared” to military families, as Marta Gurvich recounted in 1998.

Republished May 12, 2013: Mother’s Day has become a time to thank mothers for the hard work they do raising children and keeping families together, surely a worthy message. But the original Mother’s Day in 1870 had a more political intent, urging mothers to stop the horrors of war, as Gary G. Kohls wrote in 2011.

Republished May 8, 2013: Former Vietnam War correspondent Beverly Deepe Keever has just published a memoir, Death Zones & Darling Spies, in which she addresses her almost scoop on Richard Nixon’s 1968 sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks, a story that could have changed history, as Robert Parry reported in 2012.

Republished May 2, 2013: President Obama has nominated Hyatt Hotels heiress Penny Pritzker to be the next Commerce Secretary. Pritzker, also a major fundraiser for Obama’s two presidential campaigns, faced controversy because of her role in the sub-prime mortgage disaster, as Dennis J. Bernstein reported in 2008.

Republished Apr. 3, 2013: A decade ago, as U.S. troops gained control of Iraq, there were many false alarms about finding WMD, leading to President Bush declaring the discovery of mobile biological weapons labs. Robert Parry led the way in challenging that bogus claim in this analysis of America’s false reality.

Republished Mar. 21, 2013: Not only have George W. Bush and the Iraq War architects skated away from meaningful accountability, but so too have the media figures who provided the propaganda framework for the illegal invasion, a break with a principle sternly enforced at Nuremberg, Peter Dyer wrote in 2008.

Republished Mar. 16, 2013: Jorge Bergoglio’s election to be Pope Francis has revived troubling questions about the Catholic Church’s role in the Argentine “dirty war” and other right-wing repression in Latin America of the 1970s and ’80s. But the history goes back to ties to the Nazis, as the late Georg Hodel wrote in 1999.

Republished Mar. 15, 2013: As Argentina’s Dirty War killed some 30,000 people, including 150 Catholic priests, dictator Jorge Rafael Videla kept up good relations with Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, who admits the Church should have done more given the horrors, as described by Marta Gurvich in 1998.

Republished Mar. 14, 2013: In 1987, amid the Iran-Contra inquiry, investigators found that the scandal fit within a larger Republican scheme for manipulating American public opinion through CIA-style disinformation. But GOP senators blocked inclusion of the chapter in the final report, Robert Parry wrote in 2008.

Republished Mar. 8, 2013: During the late-Nineteenth-Century struggles against America’s Robber Barons and the Ku Klux Klan, Lucy Gonzales Parsons was a brave fighter for human rights. In recognition of International Women’s Day, we are re-posting William Loren Katz’s account of her remarkable life.

Republished Mar. 2, 2013: The saying goes: “truth is the first casualty of war.” But it’s also true that war-time truth-tellers often end up as “collateral damage.” A new book, Inappropriate Conduct, tells the story of a World War II correspondent whose career was crushed by the intrigue he uncovered, as Don North reported in 2010.

Republished Feb. 24, 2013: Director Kathryn Bigelow won an Oscar for “The Hurt Locker” and is in the running again with “Zero Dark Thirty,” but both movies have a troubling undercurrent of racism, heroic Americans operating in a world of apathetic or crazy Muslims, wrote Robert Parry.

Republished Feb. 24, 2013: “Zero Dark Thirty,” the big-screen chronicling of the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, won critical acclaim for its taut storytelling, but the Oscar-nominated film ignored the complex history between the CIA and its terrorist target, wrote Jim DiEugenio.

Republished Feb. 24, 2013: The hunt-for-bin-Laden film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” portrays torture as a key element in that search. But the filmmakers distorted the facts and ignored the reality that torture is illegal, immoral and dangerously ineffective, wrote Marjorie Cohn.

Republished Feb. 24, 2013: Two Oscar favorites – “Argo” and “Zero Dark Thirty” – purport to tell real-life stories about America’s troubles in the Middle East, one an escape-from-Iran thriller and the other a get-bin-Laden film. But neither confronts some hard realities, wrote Winslow Myers.

Republished Feb. 24, 2013: An Oscar frontrunner for best picture is “Argo,” depicting a little-known chapter of the U.S-Iran hostage standoff in 1979-81. Yet, while focusing on this story of six hostages escaping, “Argo” missed bigger dramas, before and after, as David Swanson explained.

Republished Feb. 19, 2013: The strange saga of how Israel “disappeared” Australian-born Ben Zygier into a high-security jail as “Prisoner X” and how he died under suspicious circumstances sheds new light on Israel’s efforts to silence ex-intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe in the 1990s, as Marshall Wilson reported in 2012.

Republished Feb. 12, 2013: Pope Benedict XVI’s abdication ends the career of a Catholic intellectual who understood the need for Church reform but joined with John Paul II and other conservatives to protect an autocratic system that failed to stop pedophile priests or meet the needs of the faithful, wrote Catholic theologian Paul Surlis in 2012.

Republished Jan. 31, 2013: Sen. John McCain and other Republicans cited Chuck Hagel’s opposition to the Iraq War “surge” as their chief attack line to block his nomination to be Defense Secretary, but Hagel refused to accept their distortion of history, defying a cherished myth of Official Washington, which Robert Parry described.

Republished Jan. 12, 2013: The New York Times reports UN nuclear monitoring chief Yukiya Amano is dampening hopes for new nuclear talks with Iran by demanding access to its Parchin military base. But the press still ignores evidence Amano is no honest broker, but part of the U.S./Israel camp, as Robert Parry reported in 2011.

Republished Dec. 28, 2012: With Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s death on Thursday – and the declining health of ex-President George H.W. Bush – an era of war and intrigue is coming to an end, a time of resurgent U.S. imperialism that saw this warrior seeking peace and the politician wanting war, as Robert Parry wrote in 2011.

Republished Dec. 20, 2012: A State Department inquiry found serious lapses in security at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, where the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans died in an assault last Sept. 11. But the CIA’s connection is still downplayed, as ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman noted last month.

Republished Dec. 15, 2012: As the United States wrestles with the latest gun massacre – this time aimed at Connecticut kindergarteners – the real question is the character of American adults, many of whom punish gun-control advocates at the polls. Is America a nation of wildebeest, as Robert Parry asked after an earlier massacre.

Republished Dec. 9, 2012: Modern U.S. history is more complete because journalist Gary Webb had the courage to revive the dark story of the Reagan administration’s protection of Nicaraguan Contra cocaine traffickers in the 1980s. But Webb ultimately paid a terrible price, as Robert Parry reports.

Republished Dec. 9, 2012: The U.S. political/media world often operates without justice. Truth-tellers get punished and the well-connected get off. On this eighth anniversary of journalist Gary Webb’s suicide, we are re-posting one of the stories that Webb’s brave work forced out, albeit without a satisfying ending.

Republished Dec. 4, 2012: In the month-long (or even longer) “Christmas season,” there is much faux outrage from Fox News and the Right about a “war on Christmas,” even as public places are adorned with Christmas decorations and Christmas music fills the air, as Robert Parry noted in 2005.

Republished Nov. 19, 2012: As Israel again “mows the grass” in Gaza – taking revenge on Palestinians for firing crude missiles into Israeli territory – the myth upon which the Jewish government stakes its claim to the land is front and center. But the myth faces challenges even inside Israel, as Morgan Strong reported in 2009.

Republished Nov. 19, 2012: Just days after President Obama’s reelection, Israel launched a punishing bombing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza – much as Israel did shortly after his election in 2008. Obama again is put in a tight spot, but other U.S. presidents faced similar challenges, as Morgan Strong reported in 2010.

Republished Oct. 29, 2012: War with Iran is on the Nov. 6 ballot with President Obama on the verge of a peace deal and Mitt Romney favoring confrontation. The choice is like 1968 when many on the Left distrusted President Johnson’s Vietnam peace promises and enabled Richard Nixon to extend the war four years, Robert Parry noted last June.

Republished Sep. 20, 2012: Christian conservatives are cheering Mitt Romney’s attack on a 14-year-old comment by Barack Obama endorsing a limited “redistribution” of wealth, but they ignore that Jesus called for a far more radical wealth redistribution – and it may have led to his crucifixion, as Rev. Howard Bess wrote in 2011.

Republished Sep. 13, 2012: The assault by radical Islamists on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, killing U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three of his aides, underscores the under-reported risk of the U.S.-backed military campaign against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, as Robert Parry noted in 2011.

Republished Sep. 2, 2012: The death of Rev. Sun Myung Moon at 92 ends the long personal saga of a Korean theocrat whose life intertwined his bizarre religion with threads into organized crime and right-wing politics. Moon also showed how a fortune spent on media could change Washington’s political dynamic, as Robert Parry wrote in 2010.

Republished Aug. 28, 2012: An Israeli court has ruled that Rachel Corrie “put herself in danger” and thus Israel bears no blame for the 23-year-old American being crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as it leveled Palestinian homes in Gaza in 2003. Last March, the ninth anniversary of her death, her parents recalled her sacrifice.

Republished Aug. 20, 2012: As Republicans and the Tea Party seek to dismantle the New Deal’s social contract, one of their heroes, Dick Cheney, concedes that his personal success traces back to the federal government’s intervention against the depredations inflicted on Americans by “free-market” capitalism, writes Robert Parry.

Republished Aug. 6, 2012: One year ago, 30 U.S. soldiers – many from SEAL Team 6 – died when a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, deaths that ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern said, tragically, were in vain. Though the war has faded from view, the killing goes on, 46 U.S. dead in July, eight more last week.

Republished Jul. 14, 2012: July 14 is a French holiday celebrating the 1789 liberation of the Bastille prison in Paris, leading to the overthrow of the monarchy. But there were less auspicious events connected to that date in 2003, during the autocratic presidency of George W. Bush, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote in 2007.

Republished May 23, 2012: In 2009, when Scotland released Libyan Ali al-Megrahi after his prostate cancer was deemed terminal, U.S. and UK polls and pundits thundered against freeing the “Lockerbie bomber,” an outrage reprised this week after his death. But Megrahi’s odd conviction was not questioned, as Lisa Pease noted.

Republished May 23, 2012: With the death of Ali al-Megrahi over the weekend, the Western press was again filled with references to him as the “Lockerbie bomber,” even though the New York Times finally conceded how dubious his conviction was. At Consortiumnews.com, William Blum made that point in real time.

Republished May 10, 2012: The urgent question facing the advanced capitalistic societies of Europe and the United States is: can “free markets” still meet the people’s needs or will those needs be sacrificed to the market’s demand for “austerity” — and if so, what does that mean for democracy — as Robert Parry asked in 2009.

Republished May 5, 2012: Robert Draper’s new book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do, describes Newt Gingrich and other Republicans plotting on Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day how to sink his presidency. But that plot has been obvious for years in GOP obstruction of Obama’s recovery plans, as Robert Parry noted in 2010.

Republished May 1, 2012: One year ago, President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden, ending a near-decade-long manhunt. Amid U.S. celebrations, it was largely forgotten that the delay in getting the terrorist leader resulted from blunders by George W. Bush and his neocon advisers, Robert Parry wrote in 2011.

Republished Apr. 26, 2012: Some loyalists still defend President George W. Bush’s honesty by insisting he really believed the bogus intelligence on Iraq’s WMD – and, true, it is impossible to know what was in his mind. But Bush did lie about Iraq’s WMD in another way, as Robert Parry explained in 2010.

Republished Apr. 19, 2012: The real Patriots Day – not the Monday holiday observed in Massachusetts – falls on April 19, honoring the Minutemen who rallied against a British strike at Lexington and Concord in 1775. The British were thwarted, in large part, because of a little known patriot, as Robert Parry recalled in 2011.

Republished Apr. 17, 2012: Nordic/Christian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik admitted killing 77 people last summer but claimed “self-defense,” protecting Christian culture from Muslims and “multiculturalists.” His writings show he was inspired by anti-Muslim bigotry spread by U.S. “experts,” Robert Parry explained in 2011.

Republished Apr. 7, 2012: Celebrating Easter in 2009, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern saw progress toward ending the Iraq War and hope that George W. Bush and other U.S. war criminals might finally face justice. Three years later, however, many of those dreams of accountability remain unfulfilled.

Republished Apr. 1, 2012: Over the centuries as Christianity bent to the interests of the rich and powerful, the story of Jesus’s fateful week in Jerusalem was reshaped to minimize perhaps its central event, his overturning of the money tables at the temple, a challenge to the merging of religious and political power, says Rev. Howard Bess.

Republished Mar. 17, 2012: Three years ago, President Obama ignored warnings about an Afghan quagmire and followed the advice of Bush administration holdovers into a series of troop “surges” that have cost many lives but not turned around the war, a result that ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern foresaw at the time.

Republished Mar. 13, 2012: As Americans watch HBO’s “Game Change” about Election 2008 – and reflect on the madcap Republican presidential race of 2012 – they confront again the GOP’s modern tendency to promote patently unfit individuals for high office, as Robert Parry observed in 2009 when Sarah Palin resigned as Alaska’s governor.

Republished Mar. 13, 2012: HBO’s “Game Change” shows John McCain’s presidential campaign recklessly picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate and then learning she lacked basic knowledge about the world. However, as Robert Parry reported in 2008, the campaign still went for the jugular against Barack Obama.

Republished Feb. 23, 2012: As the International Atomic Energy Agency clashes with Iran over access to a military site, the U.S. government and mainstream news media are denouncing Iran. But no one recalls the WikiLeaks documents that exposed the bias of the new IAEA leaders, as Robert Parry reported in 2011.

Republished Feb. 23, 2012: In 2008, Rick Santorum declared, “Satan has his sights on the United States of America.” Though sounding odd to many, Santorum’s Satan talk is common among right-wing Christians who have intervened in U.S. politics before, like President Clinton’s impeachment, as Frederick Clarkson noted in this 1998 article.

Republished Feb. 20, 2012: On Presidents’ Day, opinion polls rate the greatest U.S. presidents, with Ronald Reagan now typically scoring at or near the top — and George W. Bush at or near the bottom. Though the Bush rating is hard to dispute, Robert Parry argued in 2009 that Reagan deserved a similar placement.

Republished Feb. 15, 2012: A year ago, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern protested a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by standing in protest, before being assaulted by security guards and arrested. McGovern’s non-violent act became part of a year of protest against powerful forces ignoring the people’s will.

Republished Jan. 31, 2012: Last week’s decision by a U.S. military court to give no jail time to the sergeant in charge of troops at the Haditha massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqis means no serious penalties for anyone associated with what, in 2006, Robert Parry called “Bush’s My Lai.”

Republished Jan. 16, 2012: Though it remains risky in U.S. media and political circles to criticize Israel, there is a growing alarm even at the New York Times about the extremist trends of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox who are demanding segregation by sex, ethnicity and religious practices, as Robert Parry noted in this 2010 article.

Republished Dec. 31, 2011:As the West’s confrontation with Iran grows more dangerous – and major U.S. news outlets blame Iran – it may be worth recalling the documents that revealed how the U.S. and its allies showed bad faith in talks with Iran about its nuclear program, as Robert Parry reported in 2010.

Republished Dec. 25, 2011: Congress keeps expanding government powers in the “war on terror” even when President Obama doesn’t ask for them, unlike President George W. Bush who proudly signed the Military Commissions Act, a precursor to the indefinite detention in today’s National Defense Authorization Act, as described by Robert Parry in 2006.

Republished Dec. 23, 2011: In the pre-Civil War years of the United States, Abolitionists and other social reformers transformed Christmas into a season for addressing the abuses of slavery and mistreatment of children, creating symbols and traditions that endured, writes William Loren Katz.

Republished Dec. 21, 2011:This week, House Republicans fancied themselves reliving Braveheart’s Battle of Stirling as they blocked a compromise to extend a tax cut for 160 million working Americans – after having protected tax breaks for the rich – a misguided metaphor from the Scottish patriot’s real history that Robert Parry researched in 2005.

Republished Dec. 20, 2011: It’s Christmastime again, so just as families pull their tree ornaments and lawn decorations out of storage, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets dust off their annual outrage over the so-called “war on Christmas,” which is just as phony now as it was when Robert Parry addressed the topic in 2005.

Republished Dec. 15, 2011: The declared end of the Iraq War leaves behind not only scars from eight-plus years of violence but questions about how the American people got lured into the disaster, a question that Robert Parry addressed only a month after President George W. Bush celebrated “Mission Accomplished.”

Republished Dec. 15, 2011: Unrepentant Iraq War hawks accuse President Obama of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by completing the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. But the terrible arc of George W. Bush’s invasion was apparent to some military analysts from the war’s first days, as Robert Parry reported just 11 days into the conflict.

Republished Dec. 11, 2011: While preparing the Dec. 9 article on Gary Webb, we pulled up a 1998 article that helps explain how inconvenient facts from recent U.S. history sometimes get “found” and then “lost” again. That summer, a CIA report exposing Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking forced the New York Times to admit the point, but it soon forgot.

Republished Dec. 9, 2011: The U.S. political/media world often operates without justice. Truth-tellers get punished and the well-connected get off. On this seventh anniversary of journalist Gary Webb’s suicide, we are re-posting one of the stories that Webb’s brave work forced out, albeit without a satisfying ending.

Republished Nov. 24, 2011: On Thanksgiving Day, the United States celebrates the tradition of Pilgrims and Native Americans sitting down together in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621 to celebrate each other as friendly neighbors. But the reality was not so pleasant, as historian William Loren Katz recalled.

Republished Nov. 17, 2011: At the G20 summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy commiserated with President Barack Obama about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Sarkozy called a “liar,” prompting Obama to say: “You’re fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day.” But struggling with Israeli leaders is not new, Morgan Strong reported.

Republished Nov. 3, 2011: A 9-foot-high bronze statue honoring President Ronald Reagan has been unveiled at National Airport, continuing the deification of the right-wing icon. Left out of the celebration was anything about Reagan’s dark side, as Robert Parry recounted in this article from 1999.

Republished Oct. 20, 2011: As U.S. policymakers and pundits celebrate the brutal murder of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, his torture and execution are being justified by glib references to his purported role in the Pan Am 103 bombing in 1988. But William Blum found a different reality in the records.

Republished Oct. 20, 2011: U.S. officials are congratulating themselves after NATO aircraft bombed a convoy fleeing the Libyan town of Sirte, leading to the capture and murder of Muammar Gaddafi – the grisly affair justified by Gaddafi’s supposed role in the bombing of Pan Am 103. But the evidence goes in a different direction, Robert Parry wrote.

Republished Oct. 9, 2011: In Argentina, a case of a 35-year-old woman may finally prove that military officers in the Dirty War of the 1970s had a systemic scheme for stealing babies from female dissidents who were murdered. In this 1997 article, Argentine journalist Marta Gurvich examined one of these shocking cases.

Republished Oct. 7, 2011: At the 10th anniversary of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, we are re-publishing two articles by Washington insiders, CIA analyst Peter W. Dickson and lobbyist Bruce P. Cameron. Both issued unheeded warnings about the looming catastrophe – Dickson while at the CIA in the 1980s, alarmed by Pakistan’s progress toward a nuclear bomb.

Republished Oct. 7, 2011: A mythology has long surrounded why America got into its 10-year-long Afghan war, based on the false premise that Washington’s big mistake was abandoning Afghanistan after the Soviets departed in 1989. The reality was quite different, as foreign policy expert Bruce P. Cameron explained.

Republished Sep. 24, 2011: Stan Goff, the ex-U.S. Special Forces soldier who helped Pat Tillman’s family expose the Army’s cover-up of the former NFL star’s friendly fire death in Afghanistan, wrote this story about his own military experience. It was published at Consortiumnews.com on Dec. 22, 1999.

Republished Sep. 11, 2011: The terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, sent the United States into a 10-year downward spiral, not because of the attacks themselves but because of disastrous political judgments that followed. In recognition of the tenth anniversary, we have compiled six articles by Robert Parry, chronicling this decade of descent, starting just two weeks after 9/11.

Republished Sep. 8, 2011: In recognition of the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we will be publishing some past stories about the consequences of that momentous day. On Sept. 11, 2008, the seventh anniversary, Peter Dyer reflected on “what if” the United States had responded with demands for justice, not wars of conquest.